![]() ![]() What’s more, 80 percent of the plays printed in the 1580s were written anonymously, and that number didn’t fall below 50 percent until the early 1600s. Yet scholars have lately established that women were involved in the business of acting companies as patrons, shareholders, suppliers of costumes, and gatherers of entrance fees. Religious verse and translation were deemed suitable female literary pursuits “closet dramas,” meant only for private reading, were acceptable. The prevailing view, however, has been that no women in Renaissance England wrote for the theater, because that was against the rules. Six lead armies.Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]() Eight disguise themselves as men, outwitting patriarchal controls-more gender-swapping than can be found in the work of any previous English playwright. At least 10 defy their fathers, bucking betrothals they don’t like to find their own paths to love. The critic John Ruskin said, “Shakespeare has no heroes-he has only heroines.” A striking number of those heroines refuse to obey rules. “One would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman,” wrote Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century philosopher and playwright. Long before Tina Packer marveled at the bard’s uncanny insight, others were no less awed by the empathy that pervades the work. Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print? Yet a simple reason would explain a playwright’s need for a pseudonym in Elizabethan England: being female. None of the candidates has succeeded in dethroning the man from Stratford. The time had come, I felt, to tug at the blinkers of both camps and reconsider the authorship debate: Had anyone ever proposed that the creator of those extraordinary women might be a woman? Each of the male possibilities requires an elaborate theory to explain his use of another’s name. Even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover’s son. In response, orthodox Shakespeare scholars have settled into dogmatism of their own. * They continue to have champions, whose fervor can sometimes border on fanaticism. But more than two centuries passed before alternative contenders began to be promoted-Francis Bacon Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, prominent among them. Assorted comments by his contemporaries have been interpreted by some as suggesting that the London actor claimed credit for writing that wasn’t his. Theories that others wrote the corpus of work attributed to William Shakespeare (who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died in 1616) emerged in the mid-19th century. “Why was Shakespeare able to see the woman’s position, write entirely as if he were a woman, in a way that none of the other playwrights of the age were able to?” In her book about the plays’ female characters, Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, asked the question very much on my mind. And when the plays lean on historical sources (Plutarch, for instance), they feminize them, portraying legendary male figures through the eyes of mothers, wives, and lovers. (“Let’s consult together against this greasy knight,” resolve the merry wives of Windsor, revenging themselves on Falstaff.) These intimate female alliances are fresh inventions-they don’t exist in the literary sources from which many of the plays are drawn. ![]() I was reminded of all the remarkable female friendships, too: Beatrice and Hero’s allegiance Emilia’s devotion to her mistress, Desdemona Paulina’s brave loyalty to Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and plenty more. Emilia, in one of her last speeches in Othello before Iago kills her, arguing for women’s equality (“Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them”). Kate, in The Taming of the Shrew, refusing to be silenced by her husband (“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, / Or else my heart concealing it will break”). Isabella, in Measure for Measure, fearing no one will believe her word against Angelo’s, rapist though he is (“To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”). Rosalind, in As You Like It, affecting the swagger of masculine confidence to escape those limitations (“We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside, / As many other mannish cowards have / That do outface it with their semblances”). Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing, raging at the limitations of her sex (“O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace”). Pulled back into plays I’d studied in college and graduate school, I found myself mesmerized by Lady Macbeth and her sisters in the Shakespeare canon. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |